10 Ways to Measure & Manage the User Experience

by Jeff Sauro | December 20, 2011

Improving the user experience means starting with the right measure or measures to manage.

Here are 10 of the more common ones I’ve written about:

SUPR-Q: The Standardized Universal Percentile Rank-Questionnaire is a 13 item instrument for measuring website usability, credibility/trust, loyalty and appearance. Scores are based on a database of 200 websites from tens of thousands of users across dozens of industries.

Net Promoter Score Benchmarks: How likely people are spreading a positive message about your software is a good indicator of future growth. It’s even better to know how your product’s NPS compares with the industry.

10 Essential Usability Metrics: Know these metrics, use them and improve them to make a better user experience.

Disasters: The only thing worse than task failure would be when a user fails a task but she thinks she completed it successfully. This is a disaster and across 174 tasks I’ve seen up to 30% of user task-attempts end in a disaster. Don’t let this be your task.

Usability Problems: Low task completion rates, high task times and abundant disasters are usually caused by problems in the user interface. Find them, fix them and prevent them.

First Clicks: If a user clicks down the wrong path, less than half eventually complete the task successfully. If the first click is down the right path, 87% succeed.

Usefulness: If it’s not useful then it won’t get used and there will be no user experience to measure. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is a questionnaire for measuring usefulness. Usability itself is actually a good predictor of usefulness in the TAM (when a product is easy to use it suddenly becomes useful: think TiVO).